Building a case for a digital asset management solution at your organization is not easy, especially when the challenge you’re facing isn’t easy to grasp, nor attribute to a specific value, such as revenue or operational costs. Unfortunately, your personal frustration around inefficiencies of file management is simply not enough to push a large investment into DAM across the finish line. It remains very difficult to show how the content chaos is directly impacting the bottom line, or how inaccessibility of sales materials is negatively affecting the sales process, for example. Nonetheless, it’s exactly this kind of data that will help you make your business case for DAM.
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The good news: it’s not completely impossible to attribute the cost of inefficiency to something abstract, like digital and creative file management. If you have the tools to uncover the problem and quantifiably show what this means for the organization, you’re in a good position to build a case.
In this article, we will not only “give the fish” (an internal DAM survey), but teach you how to effectively “fish” for the right data to support your cause. Although we can’t promise that this survey will give you the results supporting your need for a DAM, we do promise that it’ll help you identify the actual problem your organization is facing. Maybe you don’t even need a DAM, and a CMS is more applicable; at least you’ll find out before embarking on any kind of software implementation journey.
Understand current practices and underlying pain points
The main goal of the survey is understand the current state in which the organization functions, then to discover patterns and subsequently identify opportunities for improvement.
Asking simple questions, like: “How do you share files?” or “Where do you store files?” can already uncover a wide array of tools that are being used to essentially carry out the same end goal. Digging a bit deeper and asking binary or open questions about how they find files can open another pandora’s box of methods that are being used. Gathering this data will help you see where there’s a need to “fix” something.
Use the data to understand the challenges you’re solving
From a survey we carried out with a prospective client, we discovered a comical but slightly disturbing fact. The survey results show that the second most popular method for finding a file (roughly 45% of the time!) was “asking a colleague.”
We’re glad to see that people are interacting with one another and staying healthy by getting their daily steps in… but surely there must be a more efficient way.
Crunch the numbers, then make your case for DAM
The example above is just one insight that you can use to build a case, but ideally you’ll be looking at aggregated data rather than stand alone data points without greater context. You can slice the data in ways that help you identify challenges across different departments or even user types within your company. Ultimately, you’ll be crunching numbers so that it helps you come up with meaningful recommendations that you can pitch to different stakeholders.
Tell a story that ties it into company goals
Data is one thing; valuable information that your colleagues can use to make decisions is another. Once you’ve uncovered the data that supports your case for DAM, you will want to make sure that your initiative caters to the company goals and that each key stakeholder feels that it will help his/her team somehow. With this, you’ll be able to outline the current state and the possible (better and improved) future state.
Tying in the need for DAM with what’s relevant, and pertinent, to the company’s growth is key for getting your message across and getting stakeholders to become your champions and executive sponsors.
Your internal survey, ready to execute
Now that you know what to do, here’s your internal DAM survey! This survey, created by our in-house implementation experts, will help you gather feedback for the types of digital assets you have, how they can be organized, and how you can use a digital asset management (DAM) tool to help solve workflow pain points and collaborate more efficiently.
We understand that the steps above can seem daunting, but we greatly encourage you to take this step as there’s seldom as good a feeling as having hard data to support your cause.
Did you find this article useful and want to take the next steps in your DAM journey? Check out our ultimate DAM toolkit with actionable resources to help you steer the journey.
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